The general connection between the three is that they all include my personal opinion about a certain matter, they all definitely have engaging images (GIFs abound!), and I also promoted them on Twitter.

Part of its “success” apparently comes from the unique value it provided in the local context in which I wrote it.

As you may accurately assume, the contents of that blog post is about a WordCamp that I attended, and that in itself is already a call for attention. But more notably, it is one of the few posts—written in English—that highlights the smaller of the two annual major WordCamp events held in Japan (the main event being WordCamp Tokyo).

Without talking too much about the event, since I do most of that in the post itself, I can say that, perhaps maybe, foreign coverage of WordCamps in Japan is not so common at the moment. I say this with a grain of salt because this was my first WordCamp after all, so I have no prior experience or events to compare it with.

The majority of the event was conducted in Japanese. Naturally, the majority of the community was also Japanese. And if there is anything you should know about English in Japan, it is still a developing language among its people and to find any hint of English fluency in an individual—even at a beginner conversational level—is extremely rare.

Having studied Japanese since the beginning of high school and having lived in Japan for almost six years now, my level of Japanese is sadly nowhere near where it should be, but, I can still confidently say that I can engage in and hold conversations without too many problems.

With that, I was able to not only meet a lot of great people within the Japanese WordPress community, but I also had the opportunity to share some meaningful conversations, in addition to swapping quite a few business cards (something that was a first for me).

I believe this kind of positive experience that I had would not have been possible if I had known the local language. It is very easy for someone to feel left out if they can’t speak Japanese, and as inviting as the Japanese are to foreigners, not just in the WP community, but in Japan in general, there is a limit to how much meaningful connection you can make with limited to no Japanese language skill.

So when I try to recall the crowds at the event, it was relatively small, and within that crowd I may have been quite possibly the only, or at least one of the few, foreigners with a conversational-level of Japanese.

And I think I’m starting to drift off topic here, so long story short, the probable reasons for the success of this post is that:

1) it connects directly to an event I experienced personally,

2) the contents of the post are written in English, which makes news from this part of Japan more accessible to the rest of the world that doesn’t understand Japanese, and

3) my blog post is directly linked to the homepage of the WordCamp itself.

This is part of an effort to improve as a writer and to get myself writing more. So as not to focus so much on perfection and formatting, when responding to these prompts, I use more of a stream-of-conscious style of writing. One of my goals is to become faster at getting my ideas out of my head and onto a physical platform, while keeping in mind to gradually build up my skill at doing so in a more fluid and concise manner. These prompts come from the ebook: 365 Days of Writing Prompts by The Daily Post at WordPress.com